This invention relates to a system for managing and distributing offers.
Many organizations currently use traditional marketing channels, such as direct mailings, and increasingly electronic delivery, such as electronic mail (email) or the World Wide Web, for delivery of advertising and sales offers to its customers or potential customers. In large organizations, offers to a particular customer may originate from different parts of the organization. There is the potential that offers to that customer from these different parts of the organization or through different channels may conflict in some way, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the communication with that customer.
Many customers may prefer to receive fewer offers from a particular organization or over a particular channel, or to receive no offers at all. For electronic channels, such as email, an organization may provide a mechanism to “unsubscribe” from all future offers. The customer may also configure his or her client software to discard future offers, for example, by discarding email from a particular address. Web-based advertising on web sites is often targeted to particular classes of users, for example by keeping a record of individual user's previous activities on those web sites.